Cora understood why the fake duchess shooed her away a few hours ago, concluding “no harm done,” or however she’d put it. Meaning no harm done toher. There was loads of harm done on Cora’s end. Her score was foiled, and now with Dinah on her scent, her days are numbered with the show—unless Cora keeps her word to Maeve and stops her side hustle, but that means Long Creek Farm is as good as gone. There’s also the undeniable fact that Cora will never again meet a fakeduchess, or rather, a woman so astute at playing a fake duchess that she had a party of hundreds fooled.
This woman might prove a bigger score than thousands of sneak-and-grab jobs, as she called them. And Cora cannot let her slip away.
Before losing her nerve, Cora approaches the house, passing a well-dressed couple stepping out from another carriage on the corner, laughing, cheeks flushing in the cold November night, Manhattan showing no signs of slowing down, although it must be nearly five a.m. by now, the sun threatening to rise over the distant glimmering East River. There is something intriguing about city life, Cora will admit. The frenetic pace, bustling hustle, high society and all their elaborate social rituals. And yet she’s made an oath to herself, signed her name in blood: Long Creek Farm will be hers again. It fully consumes her, nearly all she can think about, since Ross & Calhoun swept in like a storm cloud on the Great Plains, blotting out the sun.
She’d—they’d—lost the farm almost eighteen months ago, to be exact, though the money troubles started long before that. Long Creek Farm was getting pinched on all sides by overproduction and skyrocketing distribution prices, thanks to the railroad tycoons. The boll weevil plagues of '81 only added insult to injury. And it was just her and her father, besides the temporary hands he’d bring on during the season—her mother, dying of a fever when she was just a baby, and her wayward older brother, not suited for farm life, long since scramming for the West and the promise of striking it rich.
A couple of neighbors looking to round out funding for a new grain elevator started pressuring her father, telling him he had to “mechanize production” on the farm or risk falling behind. “Industry is the future of this country,” she’d hearthem argue at night in their kitchen, hard-pressing him over round after round of whiskey.
Then came the meetings with the men from Topeka in their dark suits with their sham smiles, offering loans at obscenely high interest rates. Cora could smell a noxious scheme afoot, strong as manure, but Da kept shrugging her off, telling her he knew what he was doing—he’d taken care of her all his life, after all; he wasn’t about to start kowtowing to her hang-ups now. With the loans from Ross & Calhoun, Da purchased three John Doe plows, reapers, and that share in the grain elevator, all with his own farmland pledged as collateral.
In a matter of months, it all went up in smoke, Cora watching like a patron at a magic show—shocked, disbelieving, powerless to do anything to stop the spectacle. Despite the new machinery, they couldn’t keep up with the larger Topeka competitors and fell behind on payments. Da defaulted on the first, then the second and third loans, until Ross & Calhoun Loans swept in and seized their home straight out from under them.
Out of money, no land, Da became a tenant farmer, bringing Cora along to help with grunt work in the stables and kitchens. She watched him grow smaller and smaller all winter, ground down by labor and despair, until he eventually succumbed to whooping cough that following spring.
“Can’t trust no one anymore.”Da’s dying words.“Whole country’s full of cheats.”
From Cora’s vantage, though, that wasn’t wholly true. There were confidence men and their marks, weren’t there? Schemers and dupes, the whole country polarized right down the middle. There were people like Da, the over-trustful, hapless fools with targets on their backs, and then there were people out on the hunt to make theirs: bankmen, railroad magnates, folks likethose crooked politicians in Tammany Hall. The fancy set, too, like Mrs. Witt at the party, wealth wielded as a weapon, determined to take down whoever, pay whatever, in order to preserve their reign.
It had seemed like fate when Prospero rolled into town last June, one of the many traveling vaudeville acts at the local Shawnee Circus & Fair. Cora had watched the magician’s show of fire, lights, and illusions, rapt. Prospero was a professional grifter of the highest order. A man who could stand onstage and fool scores of patrons every show. Cora had already started thieving alone on the streets of Topeka, a purse here, a pocket watch there, hoping to cobble together enough to buy back her land—come out on top after all—but she had so much to learn and so far to go. Here was someone who could help her. She approached Maeve and the backstage crew after the performance, gushing with compliments, and they introduced her to Prospero. Cora left with the troupe for Lincoln, Nebraska, the very next morning.
But Prospero, the show, the road, it’s all a dead end now, what with Cora stuck backstage making three crummy dollars a week and Dinah threatening to have her sacked if she tries crooking more.
This fake duchess, however, could very well be Cora’s solution.
Her ticket to greener pastures, in more ways than one.
With new resolve, Cora taps the bronze knocker against Mr. McAllister’s door. She knows it’s far past the appropriate time to call, but Cora can’t afford to wait. It’s right now or joining the troupe on their way to Providence, Rhode Island—first stop on a lifetime journey to Nowhere Fast.
She knocks again.
A bone-weary-looking housekeeper finally answers.
“Yes, miss?”
“I’m here to see the duchess...” Cora blanks, trying to recall if she actually heard the sham name of the woman in the library, landing on “Duchess Lady Alice.”
An arched eyebrow tells Cora she guessed wrong. “Is the duchess expecting you?”
Cora smiles. “In her own way, most likely.”
The housekeeper gives a curt nod and retreats into the house, not inviting her in. Cora resists the urge to bite her nails, resting her gaze on the McAllisters’ small but lovely fenced garden beside the stoop.
“Grand Duchess Marie Charlotte Gabriella of Württemberg will be with you in a moment,” the housekeeper announces behind her with a barely contained sigh.
She leads Cora into a modest parlor with a striped settee, matching armchairs, and a crackling fireplace. “Please. Make yourself comfortable.”
Comfortable.What a tall order. Cora settles for perching on the edge of a chair.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
Cora leaps to her feet at that voice, then internally curses herself for her jumpiness.
She spins to take her first long look in the light at her mark, who must have been lurking in here all along. The Grand Duchess Marie or Alice or whoever she truly is has perhaps ten years on her. She really is a beautiful woman, although hard-looking, with a long, straight nose and that severe, pale hair—although, who knows, her entire face might soften when she smiles. Cora has yet to see a smile and cannot quiteimagine one, but she can see how the woman can get away with claiming nobility. There’s a timelessness to her appearance, a weariness too, as if she carries the weight of many generations.
“I’m here to talk to you,” Cora says. “I didn’t feel we were quite done with our earlier discussion.”
“We most certainly were,” Alice says.
